Octopus

“You’re an octopus. All mixed up, like me. One leg something, and one leg something else.”

Octopus is an anarchic new comedy about Britishness and whether anybody knows what it is. Set in a world where how British you are is determined by the state, three women have been called in for interview. Sara looks kind of Asian. Scheherazade kind of Middle Eastern. And Sarah is kind of white and has no idea why she's here. She also keeps bursting into song.

Staged against the backdrop of Brexit, the refugee crisis and fears about terrorism, Octopus is set in a dystopian world of bureaucratic box ticking and absurd interviews. At a time of increasingly anxiety over policing our cultural and geographical borders, it explores the mixed-race experience, how it feels to be seen as a foreigner in your own land, and the power of punk.

70/70 @ TARA THEATRE

At midnight on 14/15 August 1947, India and Pakistan became independent from the British Empire. A relationship that formally began with Sir Thomas Roe’s embassy to the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1615, ended over three centuries later with the independent nations of India and Pakistan.

The Indian sub-continent shaped Britain’s destiny, as much as Britain shaped modern India and Pakistan’s. Tara Theatre marks this extraordinarily intimate relationship through a series of 70 events over the course of the year - plays, music, dance and spoken word that illuminate the connections between the worlds of India, Pakistan and Britain.

“A moment comes which comes but rarely in history,
when we step out from the old to the new…”
Jawaharlal Nehru on 15 August 1947